Becoming International Again

“Becoming International Again”:
C. Wright Mills and the Emergence

of a Global New Left, 1956–1962
Downloaded from http://jah.oxfordjournals.org/ at Purdue University Libraries ADMN on May 30, 2015
Daniel Geary
For American left student activists of the early 1960s, C. Wright Mills’s 1960 “Letter to
the New Left” provided inspiration. The prominent radical sociologist and social critic
proclaimed to the emerging white student movement that “new generations of intellectu-
als” could be “real live agencies of social change.” Thus, to readers who already revered
Mills for his trenchant social analysis, “Letter to the New Left” legitimated the notion
that university students, although relatively privileged, could be pivotal agents of social
transformation. Mills’s “Letter” was published in a leading American New Left journal,
Studies on the Left, in 1961 and reprinted in pamphlet form by the movement’s most
prominent organization, Students for a Democratic Society (sds). Its publication in the
United States was all the more influential because Mills was perceived as a quintessential-
ly American thinker. He had the body of a football player and a noticeable Texas twang
in his voice. He famously rode a motorcycle and wore a black leather jacket, suggesting to
many a heroic outlaw figure akin to movie characters played by James Dean and Marlon
Brando. If such a red-blooded American could become an outspoken radical, then, far
from being un-American, left-wing politics had native roots from which it could grow.1
An interpretation of Mills as a “peculiarly American” thinker, whose primary historical
significance was his influence on the campus-based American New Left, has dominated
the often hagiographic literature about him.2 The common misconception of Mills as a
Daniel Geary is the Mark Pigott Lecturer in United States History at Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland.
The author would like to acknowledge the invaluable comments offered on previous drafts of this article by
Howard Brick, Van Gosse, Joel Isaac, Matthew Jones, Saul Landau, Nelson Lichtenstein, Richard King, Waldo Mar-
tin, Kate Mills, Doug Rossinow, and Jennie Sutton as well as those by Winifred Breines, Paul Buhle, Ed Linenthal,
Paul Lyons, and two anonymous JAH readers. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the “Intellectuals and
the Nation-State” conference held at University College, Dublin, in December 2005 and at the University of Cam-
bridge Research Seminar in American History in February 2006. The author would also like to acknowledge the
assistance of the JAH staff, particularly that of Susan Armeny, Nancy Croker, and Kimberly M. Stanley.
Readers may contact Geary at gearyd@tcd.ie.
1
C. Wright Mills, “Letter to the New Left,” New Left Review (no. 5, Sept.–Oct. 1960), 22. All subsequent
citations of the “letter” refer to this version. C. Wright Mills, “Letter to the New Left,” Studies on the Left, 1 (no.
1, 1961), 63–72; C. Wright Mills, Letter to the New Left (Chicago, 1964). For further exploration of ideas in this
article, see Daniel Geary, Radical Ambition: C. Wright Mills, the Left, and American Social Thought (Berkeley, forth-
coming, 2009).
2
Russell Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe (New York, 1997), 95. The depic-
tion of C. Wright Mills as quintessentially American is evident in the subtitles of the two most prominent books on
him: Irving Louis Horowitz, C. Wright Mills: An American Utopian (New York, 1983); and Rick Tilman, C. Wright
Mills: A Native Radical and His American Intellectual Roots (University Park, 1984). For information on Mills’s life
and primary documents, see Kathryn Mills and Pamela Mills, eds., C. Wright Mills: Letters and Autobiographical
Writings (Berkeley, 2001). Richard Gillam has contributed the best scholarship on Mills, but it does not cover Mills’s
New Left engagements. See, for example, Richard Gillam, “White Collar from Start to Finish: C. Wright Mills in
Transition,” Theory and Society, 10 (Jan. 1981), 1–30.
710 The Journal of American History December 2008
C. Wright Mills and the Emergence of a Global New Left 711
“lone-wolf writer” has cast him as a precursor to American groups such as sds, but it has
consequently neglected his substantial engagement with New Left movements emerging
outside the United States, particularly in Europe and Latin America. Yet Mills conceived
of the New Left as an international political and cultural movement, and his influence ex-
tended to radicals throughout the world. In fact, his “Letter” was originally published in
the British journal New Left Review. In it, he asked, “Who is it that is getting fed up with
what Marx called ‘all the old crap’? Who is it that is thinking and acting in radical ways?
All over the world . . . the answer’s the same: it is the young intelligentsia.” To illustrate his
point, Mills cited the revolution in Cuba, the protest march at the Aldermaston nuclear
weapons research center in England, the sit-in movement in North Carolina, and world-
wide student protests against established governments and American power in Turkey,
South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan.3
Intellectuals, Mills argued, needed to “become international again” when thinking
about radical social change and to “attempt to get in touch with our opposite numbers in
all countries of the world.” Indeed, Mills’s international conception of the New Left grew
out of concrete connections he established with intellectuals and activists in Europe and
Latin America. In encountering diverse global intellectual networks and political move-
ments, Mills gained a new conception of possibilities for radical social protest in the post–
World War II world. No longer looking to the working class as the most promising agent
for social change, as he had during the 1940s, he theorized about the galvanizing effects
of middle-class intellectual and cultural dissent in the United States and Europe in his
unpublished manuscript “The Cultural Apparatus.” He also hailed the explosion of anti-
imperialist revolutionary movements in the underdeveloped world. No longer focusing
primarily on American society, Mills enlightened U.S. and world audiences on issues of
international significance by publishing two influential books, The Causes of World War
Three (1958), an outgrowth of his engagement with the peace movement in the United
States and abroad, and Listen, Yankee (1960), a defense of the Cuban Revolution.4
By revealing the international context in which Mills thought and acted during the
last years of his life, from 1956 to his untimely death of a heart attack in 1962, this essay
examines a significant and not yet fully explored episode in twentieth-century intellectual
history. More important, by offering a different interpretation of Mills, it suggests a new
understanding of the New Left. The standard depiction of Mills as an influence on white
campus-based American radicals figures in a narrative that places students at the center of
the American New Left and focuses on the rise and fall of sds, whose leaders were great
admirers of Mills. In recent years historians have seriously challenged this sds-centered
narrative of the U.S. New Left. Van Gosse has offered a compelling critique, arguing that
it narrows our view of the American New Left both chronologically and demographically.
Gosse instead defines the New Left as a “movement of movements,” an overlapping set of
individuals and institutions of varied origins that began in the latter half of the 1950s and
3
For accounts that slight the international dimension of Mills’s New Left thought, see James Miller, “Democracy
Is in the Streets”: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (New York, 1987), 78–91, esp. 83; Kevin Mattson, Intellec-
tuals in Action: The Origins of the New Left and Racial Liberalism, 1945–1970 (University Park, 2002), 43–96; and
Andrew Jamison and Ron Eyerman, Seeds of the Sixties (Berkeley, 1994), 30–46. Mills, “Letter to the New Left,”
22. Emphasis added.
4
C. Wright Mills, “Decline of the Left,” Listener, April 12, 1959, p. 598; C. Wright Mills, “The Cultural Ap-
paratus,” manuscript, boxes 4B 378–80, Charles Wright Mills Papers (Center for American History, University of
Texas, Austin); C. Wright Mills, The Causes of World War Three (New York, 1958); C. Wright Mills, Listen, Yankee:
The Revolution in Cuba (New York, 1960).
lasted well into the 1970s. Regardless of how historians of the United States define the
term “New Left,” they increasingly recognize that it consists of much more than sds. This
essay builds on the new scholarly approach by arguing that scholars must look to the web
of networks that linked together diverse political activists to grasp the historical meaning
of American social protest movements in the long 1960s.5
Mills also offers us access to an international dimension of the New Left that is poorly
incorporated into contemporary scholarship. The extraordinary fact that left-wing move-
ments for social change achieved increasing prominence in the industrialized West as
left-wing movements for national liberation gained ground in the Third World has been
much noted but little explored. Recent scholarship on the American New Left has em-
phasized social history and microhistory; despite the valuable corrective such an approach
offers to top-down narratives, it is ill equipped to capture the international scope of the
movement. Works that analyze the New Left as an international movement focus on the
outpouring of student protest in Europe and the United States in the later 1960s, particu-
larly in 1968, neglecting both the nonstudent components of postwar social protest and
the emergence of the international New Left in the late 1950s. A few writers have adopted
a comparative approach by suggesting how common economic and geopolitical elements,
such as unprecedented affluence, the expansion of mass education, and the advent of
nuclear politics, produced New Left movements in industrialized nations. But historians
have done little to explore the concrete linkages among such movements.6
This article argues that international connections were critical to the formation of the
New Left. As Thomas Bender has urged, today’s scholars must “notice the evidence of
transnationalisms previously overlooked or filtered out by [earlier] historians.” We need
to heed calls for the internationalization of U.S. history, such as Bender’s, when we study
social protest movements in the 1960s era.7 Because it can trace connections across politi-
cal borders, biography is a method for transcending historical narratives narrowly focused
on the nation-state. Studying Mills enables us to map the reemergence of international
left-wing dissent in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Of course, focusing on any individual
5
Kirkpatrick Sale, SDS (New York, 1973); Miller, “Democracy Is in the Streets”; Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of
Hope, Days of Rage (New York, 1987); Van Gosse, “A Movement of Movements: The Definition and Periodization
of the New Left,” in A Companion to Post-1945 America, ed. Jean-Christophe Agnew and Roy Rosenzweig (Mal-
den, 2002), 277–302. See also Van Gosse, Rethinking the New Left: An Interpretive History (New York, 2005). This
new scholarly direction is represented in John McMillan and Paul Buhle, eds., The New Left Revisited (Philadelphia,
2003). In this essay, I have used the term “New Left” to mean various things, but in each instance I have sought
to indicate to what it refers, whether the American New Left, the British New Left, the global New Left, or Mills’s
own conception of the New Left.
6
For examples of social history and microhistory, see Paul Lyons, The People of This Generation: The Rise and Fall
of the New Left in Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 2003); and Doug Rossinow, The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism,
Christianity, and the New Left in America (New York, 1998). Jeremi Suri, Power and Protest: Global Revolution and
the Rise of Détente (Cambridge, Mass., 2003); Arthur Marwick, The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France,
Italy, and the United States, c. 1958–c. 1974 (New York, 1998); George N. Katsiaficas, The Imagination of the New
Left: A Global Analysis of 1968 (Boston, 1987). For exceptional genuinely international approaches to the New
Left that explore concrete connections between actors in different nations, see Lawrence S. Wittner, The Struggle
against the Bomb, vol. II: Resisting the Bomb: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1954–1970
(Stanford, 1997); and Van Gosse, Where the Boys Are: Cuba, Cold War America, and the Making of a New Left (New
York, 1993).
7
Thomas Bender, “Introduction,” in Rethinking American History in a Global Age, ed. Thomas Bender (Berke-
ley, 2002), 12. In addition to the essays in that volume, see Ian Tyrrell, “American Exceptionalism in an Age of
International History,” American Historical Review, 96 (Oct. 1991), 103–55; Daniel T. Rodgers, “Exceptionalism,”
in Imagined Histories: American Historians Interpret the Past, ed. Anthony Mohlo and Gordon S. Wood (Princeton,
1998), 21–40; and David Thelen, “Of Audiences, Borderlands, and Comparisons: Toward the Internationalization
of American History,” Journal of American History, 79 (Sept. 1992), 432–62.
has its limits. In Mills’s case, the limitations include his death in 1962, when the New
Left was still gestating, and his failure to engage the vital New Left concern with racial
equality. Nevertheless, Mills’s story suggests the utility of broadening our conception of a
movement whose roots stretched beyond the physical boundaries of nation-states as well
as the chronological boundaries of the 1960s. Indeed, the origin of the term “New Left”
reflects the movement’s international dimension. British Marxists associated with New
Left Review borrowed the term from non-Communist French intellectuals of the nouvelle
gauche, who sought socialist alternatives to both Soviet-style Communism and American
capitalism.8 Mills’s use of the phrase in his “Letter” played a crucial role in its adoption in
the United States. Examining what he meant by the term and how he came to use it sug-
gests new transnational understandings of the New Left.
The “Pivotal Year”

In his “Letter to the New Left,” Mills argued that new agencies of social change would
differentiate the New Left from the Old. Mills rejected what he termed the “labor meta-
physic,” and expressed puzzlement that his British counterparts “cling so mightily to ‘the
working class’ of the advanced capitalist societies as the historic agency, or even as the
most important agency, in the face of the really impressive historical evidence that now
stands against this expectation.” Instead, he argued, radicals should look for political
opposition from whatever quarter it might come. Rather than in the labor movement,
Mills argued, radicals might find promise in the “young intelligentsia” of the world as “a
possible, immediate, radical agency of change.”9
Despite his focus on student activists, the key word in Mills’s formulation was not
“young” but “intelligentsia.” Indeed, his involvement with political movements demon-
strated to Mills (who turned forty in 1956) that participation in the New Left was hardly
limited to those of student age. Mills’s conception of the New Left consisted of two dis-
tinct elements, reflected in the dual connotations of “intelligentsia.” First, Mills pointed
to the reemergence of intellectual and cultural dissent. Inspired by his engagements with
middle-class groups such as the British New Left, dissident socialist intellectuals in East-
ern Europe, and the international peace movement, Mills identified the radical political
potential of what he termed the “cultural apparatus.” But Mills’s use of “intelligentsia”
also suggested another meaning that might have reminded readers of the Bolshevik Revo-
lution. In an unpublished 1959 fragment, Mills wrote, “the historic lever has been and
is now the political intelligentsia of pre-industrial countries” and in the margins added,
“Lenin is correct.”10 Here, Mills looked to non-Communist yet revolutionary anti-impe-
rialist movements to break through the polarities of the global Cold War order, hailing
the Cuban Revolution as a model.
Mills’s argument that an international “young intelligentsia” had replaced the orga-
nized working class as the engine of left-wing social change had an autobiographical
component, for his intellectual and political career stretched from the decline of the la-
bor-based Old Left in the mid-1940s to the growth of the New Left at the end of the
1950s. An ambitious young man born in 1916 in Waco, Texas, Mills earned degrees at
8
Stuart Hall, “The ‘First’ New Left: Life and Times,” in Out of Apathy: Voices of the New Left Thirty Years On,
ed. Robin Archer et al. (London, 1989), 14.
9
Mills, “Letter to the New Left,” 22.
10
Written note on unpublished typescript, 1959, box 4B 378, Mills Papers.
the University of Texas and the University of Wisconsin. He became a professor of soci-
ology, eventually taking a post at Columbia University in 1945, where he remained for
the duration of his career. Mills was radicalized in the early 1940s, when he fell in with
the anti-Stalinist leftist thinkers known as the “New York intellectuals.” It was Mills who
suggested the title of the small but intellectually significant publication that Dwight Mac-
donald published beginning in 1944: Politics. Immediately following World War II, Mills
became deeply involved in the American labor movement, working with union leaders
and publishing in labor journals. Mills called for a “union of the power and the intellect”
that would unite workers with middle-class intellectuals such as himself. But by the time
he published his first book, The New Men of Power, in 1948, Mills was growing disen-
chanted with labor-based social change, believing that unions were fast becoming inte-
grated into the corporate economy and the Cold War state. By the late 1940s, the Old
Left was in sharp decline due not only to weakening militancy in the labor movement but
also to anticommunist repression.11
Though most New York intellectuals abandoned their left-wing ideals in the postwar
period, Mills retained his. Thus, he became one of the few intellectuals whose commit-
ment to radical thought and politics spanned the divide between the Old Left and the
New. Even so, the radicalism Mills espoused during the 1950s was a decidedly disillu-
sioned one, reflecting the sharply diminished fortunes of the American Left. Lacking a
sense of countertendencies or dialectical contradictions that might lead to future pro-
gressive change, Mills’s classic works of social criticism of the 1950s, White Collar (1951)
and The Power Elite (1956), presented a bleak and exaggerated portrait of the United
States as a mass society dominated by large-scale bureaucracies controlled by a powerful
minority. Mills criticized American politics and society for its lack of democracy, class
inequalities, and increasing militarism. Viewing most Americans as hopelessly apathetic
in the face of such conditions, he portrayed U.S. society and politics as repressively one-
dimensional. Despairing of changing society, Mills instead emphasized the responsibility
of intellectuals to preserve in their theories alternatives to the current society that could
not be realized in practice. To the extent that Mills considered international affairs be-
fore 1956, he aligned himself with Trotskyist followers of Max Schachtman who hoped
to build a “third camp” of democratic socialism in the “two-power” world of the Cold
War. But Mills’s work focused almost entirely on the United States. In his concentration
on American society, Mills reflected larger trends in American social thought, which in
the decade after World War II was preoccupied with questions of national character and
identity.12
Mills’s embrace of the “young intelligentsia” occurred in the last period of his career,
lasting from the publication of The Power Elite in 1956 to his untimely death in 1962 at
the age of forty-six. His New Left phase began with a fortuitous conjuncture of biogra-
phy and history, as Mills’s first journey off American soil, made to Europe in 1956, coin-
cided with the first stirrings of the international New Left. As the scholar Alan Hooper
11
See, among others, Alan Wald, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from
the 1930s to the 1980s (Chapel Hill, 1987). C. Wright Mills, The New Men of Power: America’s Labor Leaders (New
York, 1948); Daniel Geary, “The ‘Union of the Power and the Intellect’: C. Wright Mills and the Labor Movement,”
Labor History, 42 (Nov. 2001), 327–45.
12
C. Wright Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Classes (New York, 1951); C. Wright Mills, The Pow-
er Elite (New York, 1956). See C. Wright Mills, Lewis Coser, and Irving Sanes, “A Third Camp in a Two-Power
World,” 1948, box 4B 361, Mills Papers. This was the golden age of American exceptionalism in historical scholar-
ship; see Rodgers, “Exceptionalism,” 26–30.
has argued, if one has to select a single starting date for the development of the European
social movements associated with the “sixties,” 1956 is the best choice. Events of that year
opened up space for groups who advocated “third way” socialism as an alternative to both
Eastern bloc Communism and Western capitalist democracy. Nikita Khrushchev’s revela-
tions of Stalinist atrocities at the Twentieth Party Congress in February and the violent
suppression of the Hungarian Revolution in November discredited the Soviet model,
while the Suez crisis, beginning in October, sparked renewed anti-imperialist protest in
Europe. Coming to Europe in the fall of 1956, Mills discovered new left-wing move-
ments reacting to these developments. The encounter not only altered Mills’s ideas but led
him to a new conception of himself as herald of the global New Left. “It’s becoming quite
a year,” Mills wrote to Lewis Coser, editor of Dissent, a democratic socialist magazine, in
early 1957, “a pivotal year, I think, for me.”13
Mills’s stay in Europe was made possible by a Fulbright teaching fellowship, which
gave many American scholars a chance to expand their conception of the world by spend-
ing an academic year abroad; in the fifteen years after the passage of the Fulbright Act in
1946, over twenty thousand Americans received fellowships. Reflecting its liberal interna-
tionalist ideals, the program intended to bolster the image of American democracy in the
world after the nation had become an unquestioned superpower. Ironically, in Mills’s case
it fostered connections between a noted radical American social critic and European left-
wing thinkers and movements. The Fulbright committee assigned Mills to the University
of Copenhagan in Denmark rather than to an institution in England, which had been his
first choice. Nevertheless, Mills took the opportunity to travel widely throughout Europe.
In March 1957 Mills lectured at the London School of Economics (lse). He discovered
there the community of left-wing intellectuals that had recently eluded him in the United
States. Writing to the director of the school following the event, Mills gushed:
I haven’t yet seen all of the western world, but, from what I have seen, I cannot
believe that there is in it any intellectual center more stimulating than the London
School of Economics. To be there was especially gratifying to me because in recent
years, quite frankly, I have often felt the lack of an audience with which I could
believe I was truly in communication. Last weekend I came to realize what such an
audience looks like.
Enthusiastic about how his lecture was received, Mills reported to Coser, “My God,
it is nice to know it makes a difference somewhere. Well, it damned well does there.
Naturally, I’m nuts about the place and everyone I met there.” Mills traveled frequently
to Britain after 1957. Indeed, he felt so at home in the British intellectual milieu that in
1961 he seriously considered permanently relocating to take a chair in sociology at the
newly created University of Sussex.14
Mills’s trip to London put him in touch with the British New Left, which would prove
the most significant intellectual connection of his later life. Consisting of two separate
strands, the British New Left emerged in reaction to the events of 1956. The first group
13
Alan Hooper, “A Politics Adequate to the Age: The New Left and the Long Sixties,” in New Left, New Right,
and Beyond: Taking the Sixties Seriously, ed. Geoff Andrews et al. (New York, 1999), 7–25. A similar argument for
the mid-1950s as a starting point for the New Left stresses decolonization, see Fredric Jameson, “Periodizing the
60s,” in The 60s without Apology, ed. Sohnya Sayers et al. (Minneapolis, 1984), 178–209. C. Wright Mills to Lewis
Coser, April 4, 1957, in C. Wright Mills, ed. Mills and Mills, 234–35.
14
Walter Johnson and Francis J. Colligan, The Fulbright Program: A History (Chicago, 1965); C. Wright Mills
to Sir Sydney Gaine, March 4, 1957 (in Daniel Geary’s possession); C. Wright Mills to Coser, April 4, 1957, in C.
Wright Mills, ed. Mills and Mills, 234; C. Wright Mills to Harvey and Bette Swados, June 13, 1961, ibid., 332.
coalesced around longtime Communist intellectuals who broke with the party under
the banner of socialist humanism. This group, based in Yorkshire, centered around the
journal New Reasoner, edited by E. P. Thompson and John Saville. In contrast, the sec-
ond group was younger, without prior connection to the Communist party, and based in
Oxford and London. Consisting largely of current students or recent graduates, it pub-
lished the journal Universities and Left Review and founded a series of New Left clubs to
promote political discussion. Though of different origins, the two groups worked closely
together, and in 1960, New Reasoner and Universities and Left Review merged to form
New Left Review.15
Mills and the British New Left found that they shared a common perspective. Together
they sought a socialist alternative to Communism—a new Left. An eclectic intellectual
and cultural movement, the British New Left rejected the bureaucratic political organiza-
tion of the Communist-based Old Left. Rather, their strategy relied on countering public
apathy by reinvigorating a left-wing public sphere of journals and clubs. Mills and British
new leftists shared the hope that by constructing alternative ideas that were “utopian” in
that they could not be immediately implemented, intellectuals could clear the ground for
the reemergence of a popular left-wing movement. As Stuart Hall, editor of the New Left
Review, wrote Mills regarding his “Letter to the New Left,” “The point about our thinking
being explicitly ‘utopian’ is what we all feel; and it has a pretty decisive effect, too, with
presenting these ideas to younger people.”16
Mills was not the only American to interact with the British New Left. Michael Walz-
er, for instance, a political philosopher who became closely associated with Dissent, was
decisively influenced by a study abroad year he spent in Oxford in 1956–1957 when he
associated with the Universities and Left Review crowd. The influential radical sociologist
Norman Birnbaum, an American teaching at the lse, was on the editorial board of Uni-
versities and Left Review and later a founding editor of New Left Review. Another Ameri-
can, Norm Fruchter, was Stuart Hall’s assistant editor at New Left Review in 1960–1962
before he returned to the United States to help edit Studies on the Left; he later helped
found the left-wing and internationalist U.S. film-making collective, Newsreel. Yet it was
Mills who became the iconic American radical for British leftists. He influenced them
with his ideas about the cultural apparatus and the nature of the New Left. But perhaps
more important, British leftists took hope from Mills’s example that they might find
compatriots in a nation that, after World War II, was increasingly seen by Europeans as a
bastion of conservatism. A writer for the London Tribune hailed Mills as “the true voice of
American radicalism.” And the leading left-wing Labour party member of Parliament Mi-
chael Foot praised Mills’s work as “the strongest blast of fresh air which has come across
the Atlantic for years.”17
Nevertheless, there was a key difference between Mills and his British friends. British
new leftists were more rooted in the Marxist tradition than was Mills. The British New
Left was primarily a middle-class movement committed to finding new agencies for so-
15
See Lin Chun, The British New Left (Edinburgh, 1993); Michael Kenny, The First New Left: British Intellectu-
als after Stalin (London, 1995); and Hall, “‘First’ New Left.”
16
Stuart Hall to C. Wright Mills, June 3, 1960, box 4B 395, Mills Papers.
17
On Michael Walzer, see Maurice Isserman, If I Had a Hammer: The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the
New Left (Urbana, 1993), 115. Norman Birnbaum, Toward a Critical Sociology (New York, 1971), vii–xi. On Norm
Fruchter, see Cynthia Young, Soul Power: Culture, Radicalism, and the Making of a U.S. Third World Left (Durham,
2006), 103–4. Review of The Causes of World War Three, London Tribune, by C. Wright Mills, Jan. 16, 1959, p. 5;
Michael Foot, “Dissent—With an American Accent,” ibid., Feb. 13, 1959, book page.
cial change besides the industrial working class. Even so, British new leftists remained
committed to a tradition of working-class radicalism that was stronger in Britain than in
the United States and that had its political expression in the left wing of a major politi-
cal group, the Labour party. As a result, they disagreed with Mills’s sharp rejection of the
“labor metaphysic.” Stuart Hall protested, “I don’t think that it is just a Marxist hangover
which made me question some of the assumptions you made in your lse lectures last
year.” Because of the stronger labor tradition in Britain, Hall argued, “we cannot write off
the working class in the same way.” And E. P. Thompson complained, “You say that ‘la-
bor alone’ can’t do the job of transforming our society, and then suggest that intellectuals
ought to try and realize their goals by themselves. Aren’t you tipping the balance too far
the other way?”18
Mills’s closest relationship among British new leftists was with Ralph Miliband, a
Marxist scholar at the lse whom Mills met during his 1957 trip. A Belgian Jew, Miliband
emigrated to Britain in 1940 at the age of seventeen and studied under the prominent
left-wing scholar Harold Laski. A lifelong independent socialist, Miliband was the only
editorial board member of New Reasoner who had never joined the Communist party.
Eight years younger than Mills, Miliband looked up to him as if he were an older brother.
As he later recalled, “I got to feel closer to Mills than I have ever felt to any man, or should
feel again, I should think.” Mills’s The Power Elite was a major influence on Miliband’s in-
fluential book, The State in Capitalist Society, which he published in 1969 and dedicated
to Mills’s memory.19
In the summer of 1957, Mills persuaded Miliband to journey with him through East-
ern Europe. Though Mills initially hoped to travel by motorcycle, they drove an auto-
mobile instead. They stopped in Yugoslavia, but Poland made the greatest impression on
Mills. Political dissent in Poland emerged in 1956 following Khrushchev’s speech at the
Twentieth Party Congress. Unlike in Hungary, where Soviet invasion quashed all political
opposition, Poland saw a degree of cultural liberalization in the late 1950s under the lead-
ership of the reformer Wladyslaw Gomulka. During Mills’s sixteen-day visit to Warsaw,
he interviewed a variety of Polish intellectuals for the project that became “The Cultural
Apparatus.”20
Mills was particularly impressed with the dissident Polish philosopher Leszek Kola-
kowski, a prominent critic of the legacy of Stalinism and one of the strongest advocates
for democratization. In the late 1960s Kolakowski fled Poland after being sanctioned for
his outspokenness, and he eventually rejected Marxism altogether. But when Mills visited
in 1957, Kolakowski was a leading international exponent of Marxist humanist philoso-
phy. Mills later wrote, “I can no longer write with moral surety unless I know that Leszek
Kolakowski will understand where I stand.” Kolakowski offered Mills an example of how
intellectual dissent could be politically explosive. Kolakowski himself believed that only
the “socialist consciousness of the intelligentsia” could rescue socialism from a repressive
Communist bureaucracy. The emphasis Kolakowski and other Eastern bloc socialist dis-
sidents placed on the potential political power of the “intelligentsia” was a crucial influ-
ence on Mills’s conception of the “young intelligentsia” as the key New Left agency. In a
18
Hall to C. Wright Mills, June 2, 1960, box 4B 395, Mills Papers; E. P. Thompson to C. Wright Mills, April
21, 1960, ibid.
19
Michael Newman, Ralph Miliband and the Politics of the New Left (London, 2002), esp. 67; Ralph Miliband,
The State in Capitalist Society (London, 1969).
20
C. Wright Mills to Leo Lowenthal, Aug. 8, 1957, in C. Wright Mills, ed. Mills and Mills, 244.
Yaroslava and C. Wright Mills (front) with Ralph and Marion Miliband in London, fall
1961. After 1957 Mills developed close relationships with the British New Left and even seri-
ously considered relocating to Britain. Mills’s closest connection in the British New Left was
Ralph Miliband, a political scientist at the London School of Economics who traveled with
Mills to Eastern Europe in 1957. Time-release photo by Yaroslava Mills. Photo courtesy of Kate
Mills and used with the permission of the Mills estate.
1960 interview in Mexico, Mills explained, “I am using this word ‘intelligentsia’ in the
East European sense to mean the whole white-collar pyramid, as well as artists, scientists,
and intellectuals in our sense.”21
Both for Mills and the global New Left, 1956 was the beginning of a “pivotal year.”
After 1957 Mills traveled frequently in search of left-wing allies throughout the world.
In 1959 he went to Britain to deliver lectures on “culture and politics,” and he returned
to Europe in September to attend an international sociology conference in Italy and to
visit Austria, Germany, and London. He also traveled to Brazil in October. In early 1960
Mills taught a seminar on Marxism at the University of Mexico. That April he toured the
21
Mills, Causes of World War Three, 129. For Leszek Kolakowski’s statement, see Stanley Pierson, Leaving Marx-
ism: Studies in the Dissolution of an Ideology (Palo Alto, 2001), 133. C. Wright Mills, “On Latin America, the Left,
and the U.S.,” Evergreen Review, 5 (Jan. 1961), 115. Emphasis added. This is an English translation of an interview
given by Mills when he was in Mexico City in early 1960.
Soviet Union for a month, conducting thirty intensive interviews with Soviet intellectuals
and officials.22 In August 1960 he traveled to Cuba. And he spent the better part of 1961
in Europe, visiting the Soviet Union once again. The pivotal year opened up new possi-
bilities for social analysis and political engagement. It led Mills to write books defending
the peace movement and the Cuban Revolution and to develop a more theoretical work
focused on the possible oppositional role of the cultural apparatus.
The Cultural Apparatus
If Mills took one idea away from his pivotal year in Europe it was the left-wing potential
of the intelligentsia. “It is with this problem of agency in mind,” Mills wrote in his “Letter
to the New Left,” “that I have been studying, for several years, the cultural apparatus, the
intellectuals—as a possible, immediate, radical agency of change.” Most of the writings
of Mills’s New Left period were what he termed “pamphlets”: pieces written for a mass
audience and addressing a timely issue. In contrast, Mills intended his book manuscript,
“The Cultural Apparatus,” to be his primary theoretical contribution to the movement.
Mills defined the “cultural apparatus” as “all those organizations and milieux in which
artistic, intellectual and scientific work goes on” and “all the means by which such work
is made available to small circles, wider publics, and to great masses.” He focused his
attention on “cultural workmen” who were particularly powerful in shaping images of
reality in “an elaborate set of institutions: of schools and theaters, newspapers and census
bureau, studios, laboratories, museums, little magazines, radio networks.” Though never
published, “The Cultural Apparatus” was an important early work of New Left theory
focused on one of the movement’s key intellectual questions: What is the oppositional
political potential of culture?23
Mills’s conception of the cultural apparatus drew on his early exposure to pragma-
tist ideas as well as certain Old Left ideas. Yet “The Cultural Apparatus” was decisively
changed by Mills’s engagement with the new agencies of social change he encountered af-
ter 1956. Indeed, in 1960, Mills considered changing the title of the manuscript to “The
New Left.” When Mills began the project in 1955, he still thought within a framework of
disillusioned radicalism and planned to analyze the roots of mass apathy in the modern
world on the assumption that political complacency was permanent. He sought to ex-
pand on his famous analysis from The Power Elite: the engaged “public” of an earlier era of
American democracy had been replaced by an apathetic “mass.” Thus, his initial use of the
term cultural “apparatus” suggested a formidable mechanism that smoothly functioned to
uphold the established political and social order. Culture, Mills feared, was being subor-
dinated to the imperatives of Cold War politics. This was most apparent, Mills claimed,
in the support most American intellectuals gave to the Cold War.24
Yet, as Mills engaged the emerging global New Left and expanded the scope of his
project beyond American intellectuals to the political role of culture in several regions of
22
C. Wright Mills to Ralph Miliband, May 25, 1960 (in Geary’s possession).
23
Mills, “Letter to the New Left,” 22; C. Wright Mills, “The Man in the Middle: The Designer,” Industrial De-
sign, 11 (Nov. 1958), 73; Mills, “Cultural Apparatus,” box 4B 378, Mills Papers. See Michael Denning, Culture in
the Age of Three Worlds (New York, 2004), 76–96.
24
Mills’s work is connected to Old Left traditions in Michael Denning, The Cultural Front: The Laboring of
American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1997), 110–13. Mills, Power Elite, 298–324; Mills, “Cul-
tural Apparatus,” box 4B 379, Mills Papers; C. Wright Mills, “The Cultural Apparatus,” Listener, March 26, 1959,
pp. 552–54.
the world, he came to a different evaluation of the cultural apparatus. Mills’s use of the
term “apparatus” now suggested, not the machinery of engineering consent, but the au-
tonomous and potentially oppositional power of cultural workmen in different nations.
Mills moved away from his earlier critique of the modern public as consisting of hope-
lessly passive and apathetic dupes of mass culture. Thus, Mills suggested, radical cultural
workmen should seek an opening within the cultural apparatus to attempt to rouse the
public out of its apathy. Asserting that cultural workers should take control of the means
of cultural production and put them to politically subversive ends, Mills called on them
to “repossess the cultural apparatus and use it for our own purposes.”25
When Mills asserted the power of cultural institutions, he aligned himself with the
British New Left. As Stuart Hall wrote, a central belief of British new leftists was that the
“cultural and ideological domain” was “not a secondary, but a constituitive dimension of
society.” By conceiving of culture as a key ground of political conflict, “The Cultural Ap-
paratus” bore a strong resemblance to the ideas of the British new leftist Raymond Wil-
liams, who saw cultural struggle as a crucial part of what he called the “long revolution.”
Similarly, British New Left historians such as E. P. Thompson came to conceive of class
as a matter of cultural identity rather than mere economic position. It is therefore unsur-
prising that the major public expression of Mills’s ideas about the cultural apparatus came
in a series of three 1959 lectures entitled “Culture and Politics” at the London School of
Economics. The lectures were well received by British new leftists, were broadcast on bbc
radio, and created a stir in the British press. The London Observer, a left-leaning newspa-
per wrote, “A huge, alarming Texan has just been lecturing to the London School of Eco-
nomics, to an excited audience of sweaters, black stockings and duffel coats.”26
Like early British new leftists, Mills had not seriously engaged with the work of key
continental Marxists, such as Antonio Gramsci, whose work would be crucial to the later
New Left discourse of culture and politics. Mills did edit a volume on Marxist theory, The
Marxists, which appeared posthumously in 1962. Because of his contact with European
leftists more steeped in socialist traditions, Mills felt the need for “a real confrontation
with ‘Marxism.’” Yet The Marxists selected orthodox Marxist texts by political leaders and
showed little engagement with the intellectual tradition identified by Perry Anderson as
“Western Marxism,” which would prove fundamental to the more sophisticated later en-
gagements of New Left intellectuals with cultural issues. Nevertheless, as has been argued
for early British new leftists, the public expressions of Mills’s ideas about the cultural ap-
paratus may have helped pave the way for the later reception of Marxist cultural theory
in the English-speaking world.27
The most important contribution of “The Cultural Apparatus” was Mills’s attempt,
in dialogue with European interlocutors, to conceive of new agencies for left-wing social
change. By asserting a power within culture that might be autonomous from the prevail-
ing political establishment and by redefining “intellectual” to include journalists, clergy,
scientists, industrial designers, screenwriters, and others, Mills suggested that the cultural
apparatus could be a New Left agency. His conception of the global New Left as resting
25
Mills, “Decline of the Left,” 596.
26
Hall, “‘First’ New Left,” 25; Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (London, 1961); E. P. Thompson, The
Making of the English Working Class (London, 1963); London Observer, Jan. 25, 1959, clippings file, box 4B 419,
Mills Papers.
27
C. Wright Mills to Hallock Hartman, Oct. 7, 1959, in C. Wright Mills, ed. Mills and Mills, 275; C. Wright
Mills, The Marxists (New York, 1962); Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism (London, 1976); David
Forgacs, “Gramsci and Marxism in Britain,” New Left Review, (no. 176, July–Aug. 1989), 70–88.
on the oppositional potential of a cultural apparatus, evident in the British New Left and
among dissident intellectuals in Eastern Europe, bore important insights. It undermined
Mills’s own tendency, still evident in his later career, to present that now-familiar image
of himself as a lone rebel against fifties-era complacency. Instead, the notion of a cultural
apparatus led him to focus on what intellectuals, broadly defined, could do as a group. It
also offered needed inspiration to new leftists across the globe, reassuring them that in-
tellectual and cultural activity could be politically significant, that ideas can and do mat-
ter. Finally, by urging intellectuals to conceive of their movement as international, Mills
challenged attempts to nationalize thought and culture and enlist them in the Cold War
struggle.28 Mills’s vision of the power of oppositional ideas left its mark on sixties-era radi-
calism. Operating largely outside established political parties and institutions in both the
United States and Western Europe, the New Left revealed that a mass movement based
on “speaking truth to power” (to borrow a popular phrase from the period) could have an
explosive effect by bringing state actions to public scrutiny.
Nevertheless, Mills’s conception of the cultural apparatus as an agency for social change
left many questions unanswered. As E. P. Thompson pointed out in a letter to Mills, “You
argue intellectual workers must repossess their own cultural apparatus and use it for their
own purposes. In what sense have they ever possessed it?”29 Moreover, Mills never speci-
fied exactly what cultural workmen should do once they repossessed the apparatus. Al-
though Mills expanded his notion of “cultural workmen” to include much more than
traditional intellectuals, his conception was also open to charges of elitism. Even ordinary
cultural workmen were relatively privileged members of society, and Mills failed to con-
sider the political agency of those who lacked cultural capital and whose participation
would presumably be essential for any significant left-wing social transformation. Finally,
Mills never asked how reenergizing public debate would lead to radical social and political
change. How could the activity of the cultural apparatus spark a mass political movement
with the capacity directly to alter state policy? In other words, how could cultural oppo-
sition translate into institutional political change? In the United States and Europe, the
New Left ultimately had to confront the limits of a political opposition using predomi-
nantly intellectual and cultural means.
Nevertheless, Mills’s conception of the potential agency of the cultural apparatus
proved highly useful in a period when left-wing movements were just reemerging. Mills’s
ability to reach a mass audience with his anti–Cold War The Causes of World War Three
and later his pro–Cuban Revolution Listen, Yankee suggested that within the cultural
apparatus there was an opening to radical ideas. In particular, Mills’s engagement with
the peace movement in the United States and abroad demonstrated how intellectual and
cultural activity might be a vital spark for political activism.
A Program for Peace

When Mills returned to the United States at the end of 1957 following his pivotal year in
Europe, he did so with the hope of finding and energizing a left-wing cultural apparatus
28
For example, the influential Congress for Cultural Freedom sought to tie American intellectual and cul-
tural production to the promotion of anticommunist goals of American foreign policy; the organization was later
revealed to have had secret Central Intelligence Agency (cia) financing. See Francis Stoner Saunders, The Cultural
Cold War: The cia and the World of Arts and Letters (New York, 2000).
29
Thompson to C. Wright Mills, April 21, 1960, box 4B 395, Mills Papers.
similar to what he had discovered in Europe. From Europe, Mills sensed a shift in public
mood back in the United States. As he wrote to his friend, the radical novelist Harvey
Swados, in 1957, “I’ve not read American publications for over a year now . . . but isn’t
it true that there’s something of a swing away from conservative silliness and incapac-
ity for moral discernment that’s paralyzed the postwar imagination? Aren’t there signs I
wouldn’t have seen? I’ve the vague feeling that ‘we’ may be coming into our own in the
next five or ten years.”30 Back in the United States, Mills sought to spread his new in-
ternationalism by drawing attention to developments abroad. Tellingly, Mills associated
himself with the segment of the U.S. Left most focused on international events and most
closely linked to compatriots overseas: the peace movement.
The reemergence of the U.S. peace movement in the late 1950s was part of an increase
in antinuclear protest movements across the industrialized world, in North America, Eu-
rope, Japan, and Australia. Because peace could be achieved only through international
cooperation, peace activists were particularly inclined to form global networks and to
think of their movement in international terms. The “ban the bomb” movement used
immediate demands, such as an end to nuclear testing, to launch a more basic challenge
to the buildup of nuclear weapons and the Cold War policies of Western governments.
The antinuclear movement was strongest in Japan, where public opinion was overwhelm-
ingly against nuclear testing and where a massive series of rallies led by university stu-
dents attracted an estimated 350,000 participants in May 1957. In Britain the New Left
was closely linked with the formation of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (cnd)
in 1958. Popular antinuclear sentiment was evident in Britain in the well-attended and
widely publicized annual marches from London to the Aldermaston nuclear facility fifty
miles away that began in April 1958.31
In the United States key activist leaders kept radical pacifism alive after World War II
and provided an experienced leadership that could mobilize the growing dissent of the
late 1950s. Energized by civil rights protests in the South that utilized nonviolent direct
action and sensing a changing public mood regarding the Cold War, A. J. Muste, David
Dellinger, and Bayard Rustin founded Liberation magazine in 1956. Over the next several
years, Liberation provided a valuable forum for the revival of pacifist and radical thought.
Readers of Liberation were keenly aware of developments throughout the world and took
heart from the growth of the international peace movement. In 1957 the Committee for
a Sane Nuclear Policy (sane) formed to oppose nuclear testing, quickly and unexpect-
edly tapping into a mass base of opposition to American nuclear policies. sane was very
similar to the cnd in its middle-class composition, and it was influenced by its British
counterpart. By the summer of 1958, sane had grown to 130 chapters with an estimated
membership of twenty-five thousand. And in 1958, a small group of pacifists connected
to the more radical Committee for Nonviolent Action (cnva) garnered national attention
by sailing into a nuclear test zone site in the Pacific Ocean to disrupt the implosion of a
hydrogen bomb.32
Beginning in the late 1950s, Mills developed close ties with radical pacifist organiza-
tions. When he died in 1962, his memorial service for family and friends was held at
30
C. Wright Mills to Harvey Swados, Sept. 9, 1957, in C. Wright Mills, ed. Mills and Mills, 246.
31
Wittner, Struggle against the Bomb, II, 41–82.
32
Isserman, If I Had a Hammer, 127–69; Lawrence S. Wittner, Rebels against War: The American Peace Move-
ment, 1933–1983 (Philadelphia, 1984), 240–56; John D’Emilio, Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin
(New York, 2003), 249–62.
This advertisement for C. Wright Mills’s Causes of World War Three appeared in
the New York Times on February 14, 1959. The book reached a wide audience in
the United States and abroad and contributed to the revival of an international
peace movement centered on antinuclear activism. Reprinted from the New York
Times.
the Fellowship of Reconciliation (for), an international interfaith pacifist organization.

Though most closely linked to the peace movement in the United States, Mills had con-
nections to the British peace movement and cited antinuclear protests throughout the
world as a key element of the global New Left in his “Letter.” Mills’s principal contribu-
tion to this revitalized international peace movement was his book, The Causes of World
War Three. Causes developed from two popular articles that he published in the Nation
and from the Sidney Hillman lectures he delivered in April 1958 to a standing-room-only
crowd at Howard University.33
The book, originally published in November 1958, was reprinted in a slightly revised
version as a mass-market paperback in 1960; it was released in time for the election and
priced at only fifty cents a copy. Unlike his earlier works, which were based on painstaking
sociological research and sophisticated theoretical analysis, Causes was a short book writ-
ten quickly to address a pressing contemporary topic and reach a mass audience. While of
little enduring intellectual significance, it had an important cultural and political impact.
Mills sought (and found) educated readers who would, he hoped, form a “public” for a
left revival, addressing his book “neither to power elites nor to people in general, but to
those who are generally aware of what is going on, who have thought about the prepara-
tion of World War III and who are becoming uneasy about it.”34
In Causes Mills used his stature as a social critic to challenge Cold War orthodoxy
and to help focus public attention on the dangers of nuclear war. At the heart of the
book was his passionate attack on the “insanity” and “idiocy” of escalating nuclear diplo-
macy between the superpowers. By the late 1950s, an expanding arms race held out the
nightmare of a massive nuclear confrontation. In identifying a “drift and thrust” toward
World War III, Mills relied on his earlier arguments about the irresponsibility of power
elites. Indeed, Causes can be viewed as a sequel to The Power Elite. Much of the first sec-
tion of the book summarized Mills’s argument that the American government was run
by a small group of interconnected political, corporate, and military leaders. When Mills
described the “causes” of World War III, he pointed to the acceptance of a “military
metaphysic” among both Soviet and American policy makers, as both sought to solve
political problems through military means, and he noted the expanded political power
of both militaries. Focusing on the United States, Mills described the wasteful military
expenditures of the permanent war economy, which reinforced a nuclear arms buildup.
He also pointed to “capitalist brinksmanship” in American foreign policy, the taking of
risks to protect American economic interests abroad. Though his analysis focused on the
American government, Mills noted the vicious circle created by the arms race, in particu-
lar how military buildup in one superpower strengthened the hands of hard-liners in the
other.35
Promoting the growing peace movement, Causes adopted a more optimistic tone than
anything Mills had written in a decade. Since the end of his time as a labor intellectual,
Mills had refused to offer any concrete proposal for political action, but he now put forth
a “program for peace.” At points, his program was vague, as when he urged the abolition
of “the military metaphysic and the doctrinaire idea of capitalism.”36 Some of his de-
mands were more imaginative, as when he proposed that the United Nations (un) take
charge of oil resources in the Middle East and that 20 percent of the U.S. military bud-
get be devoted to aid for underdeveloped nations. Characteristically, Mills emphasized
intellectual and cultural proposals, as in his suggestion that the un should use U.S. funds
to establish first-class educational programs in the Third World that emphasized the hu-
manities and social studies. He also included suggestions typical of the mainstream peace
33
Mills and Mills, eds., C. Wright Mills, 340; “U.S. Foreign Policy Hit by Mills,” Washington Post, March 25,
1958, p. A8.
34
Mills, Causes of World War Three, 8.
35
Ibid., 48, 1, 48, 58, 44.
36
Ibid., 96–111, esp. 96.
movement (ones that were implemented in the next two decades largely due to public agi-
tation), including an end to nuclear testing, negotiations with the Soviet Union to reduce
nuclear stockpiles, and U.S. recognition of Communist China. Mills’s boldest and most
controversial proposals included unilateral nuclear disarmament by the United States,
the elimination of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (nato), and the closing of all
overseas U.S. bases.
The Causes of World War Three was significant less for its specific proposals than for its
impact on an audience beginning to coalesce around the antinuclear cause. Mills sensed
the political potential of the cultural apparatus. In the United States and the United
Kingdom, for example, the peace movement was based primarily among the educated
middle class housed in universities and churches. Religious impulses and institutions
were a key component of the antinuclear movement, and one that the decidedly secular
Mills hoped to bolster by challenging Christian congregations to speak out against the
Cold War. Mills’s chapter, “A Pagan Sermon to the Christian Clergy,” sharply condemned
North American Christians for failing to live up to their ostensibly pacifist ideals. Origi-
nally delivered as a lecture to the United Church of Canada in Toronto in February 1958,
Mills published the piece in the Nation and incorporated it into his book. Mills wrote,
“Total war ought indeed to be difficult for the Christian conscience to confront, but the
current Christian way out makes it easy; war is defended morally and Christians easily
fall into line.” Speaking directly to ministers, as a potential key part of an oppositional
cultural apparatus, Mills asked, “Why do you not make of yourself the pivot, and of your
congregation the forum, of a public that is morally directed and that is morally standing
up?”37
“A Pagan Sermon” received an enthusiastic response from liberal clergy, who, while
protesting Mills’s neglect of a pacifist Christian minority, found in Mills’s article an affir-
mation of their own views. Mills’s article was mentioned in sermons throughout the na-
tion and caused a stir in the liberal Christian press. For example, the editors of Christian
Century applauded Mills’s pagan sermon, though they objected to Mills’s one-sided view
of organized Christianity. “Take time to look at the churches in action, visit the front
where the ministers you address are busy,” they told Mills, “you will see a great deal of ac-
tion on the correct side from your viewpoint.” Mills took the advice, addressing the First
Midwest Conference of the Unitarian Church in April 1958 and a number of church
meetings thereafter. In December 1958 Mills wrote to Ralph Miliband, “Tomorrow I go
lecture in Atlantic City to another group of big shot clergymen. Amazing, but they are, in
truth, apart from university groups, the only real audience I have, and some of them are
very good indeed. I am learning how to get to them and shake them up.”38
The positive reception Mills received among liberal Protestants had much to do with a
heightened emphasis in his work on the necessity of acting morally on the basis of indi-
vidual conscience. The venerable for leader A. J. Muste viewed Causes as valuable primar-
ily for its argument that national policy needed to be held to higher moral standards and
claimed that the book implied a stance of “revolutionary pacifism” based on the protest
of conscientious individuals. As his endorsement of the Cuban Revolution would show,
Mills was not a pacifist, but he must have been heartened by Muste’s positive review. Mills
37
Ibid., 149, 153.
38
“Comment on a ‘Pagan Sermon,’” Christian Century, March 26, 1958, p. 365; C. Wright Mills to Miliband,
Dec. 9, 1959 (in Geary’s possession).
had always stressed the special responsibility of intellectuals to tell the truth and confront
unjust power, but he now widened his plea to appeal to a larger stratum of society. Mills
made such appeals not only to ministers but also to other elements of the cultural ap-
paratus. For instance, he exhorted scientists to oppose Cold War secrecy on the basis of
the “classic ethos of science: its rules of open communication and independent dissent,
its tolerance based on respect for reason, its habit of truth and of fearless observation, its
demands for careful proof and its invitation to audacious speculation.”39
Though Causes received mixed reviews in the press, the enthusiastic response of indi-
vidual readers confirmed Mills’s tentative hopes about the growth of a New Left within
the United States itself. Mills received dozens of fan letters from readers, many of whom
reported being galvanized by his book. “We have been pacifists for generations, but now
we feel we can not longer be passive,” wrote a dentist and his wife from Sheboygan, Wis-
consin. “Your book made me angry, and I am looking for an outlet for my anger,” con-
cluded a New York art critic. Some readers took it upon themselves to promote the book
as a form of political action. Jesse Gordon, a New York public relations executive, for-
warded a copy of Mills’s 1960 Nation article, “The Balance of Blame,” that became part
of the revised book, to Senator Mike Mansfield. After Mansfield wrote a paragraph en-
dorsing the article’s significance, Gordon forwarded the comments to President Dwight
D. Eisenhower. And a doctor from Tampa, Florida, wrote the publisher to purchase hun-
dreds of copies of the book, which he distributed in packets of twenty-five to university
presidents across the country.40
That the reaction to Causes was not limited to Americans indicated both Mills’s new
status as an international intellectual and the global emergence of middle-class opposition
to the Cold War. British readers treasured the book not only as an antinuclear critique but
also as evidence that American society was not monolithically supportive of the Cold War
policies of its government. As Frida Laski, the widow of Harold Laski, wrote, “You cheer
my heart to hear that something different is coming out of the usa. I have read your most
interesting book, and now I hear your broadcasts, and feel that you have to muster some
courage to put this over.” Causes was reviewed in important newspapers outside the Unit-
ed States and United Kingdom, including the Johannesburg Star, the Montreal Star, and
Die Welt (Hamburg). Mills received fan mail from across the world. A German student
praised the book to Mills, as did a doctor in western Australia who told him, “The sanity
of it appeals—the more so as to thoughtful people the World over the foreign policy of
the United States since Hiroshima appears increasingly psychopathic.”41
Cuba and “the Hungry-Nation Bloc”

Before 1960, “becoming international” had oriented Mills mainly toward European left
movements and the peace movement. His trips to Latin America and subsequent involve-
ment with the Cuban Revolution introduced him to a different sort of internationalism
39
A. J. Muste, “C. Wright Mills’ Program: Two Views,” Dissent, 6 (Spring 1959), 189; Mills, Causes of World
War Three, 104.
40
Carlton F. Brehmer to C. Wright Mills, March 12, 1959, box 4B 420, Mills Papers; Dore Ashton Yunkers to
C. Wright Mills, Feb. 7, 1959, ibid.; Mike Mansfield to Jesse Gordon, June 20, 1960, ibid.; Richard C. Rodgers to
Mac S. Albert, July 23, 1959, ibid.
41
Mrs. H. J. Laski to C. Wright Mills, March 7, 1959, ibid.; Johannesburg Star, March 12, 1959, box 4B 419,
ibid.; Montreal Star, March 12, 1959, ibid.; Die Welt (Hamburg), July 23, 1960, box 4B 420, ibid.; Wolfgang Hel-
brich to Mills, Oct. 19, 1959, ibid.; Dr. Alfred Jacobs to C. Wright Mills, Oct. 8, 1959, ibid.
focused on what he called the “hungry-nation bloc.” New leftists, he now argued, would
have to confront the global imbalance of power between the industrialized and under-
developed worlds. In his best-selling 1960 book Listen, Yankee, Mills championed the
Cuban Revolution as a new type of left-wing movement that could provide a model for
anti-imperialist movements in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. Far-flung support for
the Cuban Revolution also confirmed Mills’s belief in the potential emergence of protest
within an international cultural apparatus. Playing a role in a wider movement in solidar-
ity with Cuba, Listen, Yankee demonstrated the significance of international events and
networks for the development of New Left movements in the United States, Europe, and
Latin America.
A year before he published the book, Mills knew little about the Cuban Revolution,
but discussions with Latin American intellectuals in Brazil in the fall of 1959 and Mexico
in early 1960 compelled Mills to confront the issue. In particular, during his three-month
stay in Mexico City, Mills became close to leading left-wing Mexican intellectuals, includ-
ing the prominent novelist Carlos Fuentes. This set of intellectuals proved to be crucial
contacts for Mills, allowing him first to discover and then to reach a wider Latin Ameri-
can Left. Fuentes became for Mills the model of the engaged Latin American intellectual
and a key representative of what he, in a 1961 letter to Fuentes, referred to as “our New
Left.” Mills was strongly influenced by Fuentes’s belief that “after the assassination in
Spain of the ideal internationalism of the first few decades of the twentieth century, we
are now witnessing the emergence of a concrete internationalism: that of the underde-
veloped nations.” After speaking to Fuentes and other leftists in Brazil and Mexico, Mills
came to share their belief that the Cuban Revolution would provide the impetus for this
new internationalism. Fuentes, like many Latin American leftists drawn to socialism but
disenchanted with the Soviet Union, looked to developments in Cuba as a new model
for radical social change. In an early 1960 interview in Mexico with Fuentes and other
Mexican intellectuals, Mills tenatively voiced the appeal of the Cuban Revolution as a
New Left force:
It is not within advanced capitalism or within the Soviet bloc, but within the un-
derdeveloped countries perilously outside both blocs that I see the best possibilities
for an independent Left. As for the probabilities of it, quite frankly I don’t estimate
them very high . . . I don’t know of any country which has yet displayed for us a
really new beginning—a third model of industrialization which, of course, would
be the basis for any international New Left. Maybe Cuba will turn out that way; I
haven’t been there.42
When Mills returned to the United States from Mexico, he arranged to visit Cuba in
August 1960. No doubt, Mills was flattered and intrigued to hear a report that Fidel Cas-
tro had read The Power Elite while leading the guerrilla campaign in the Sierra Maestra,
but the primary purpose of his trip was to see for himself whether Cuba really did repre-
sent a possible New Left “third model.” Mills’s visit came at a time of rapidly deteriorating
relations between Cuba and the United States. In June, at the request of the U.S. govern-
ment, American oil refineries in Cuba refused to process Soviet crude oil, leading to their
42
C. Wright Mills to Carlos Fuentes, Jan. 12, 1961, folder 13, box 116, Carlos Fuentes Papers (Department
of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library, Princeton, N.J.). For the statement by Car-
los Fuentes, see Martin Van Delden, Carlos Fuentes, Mexico, and Modernity (Nashville, 1998), 42. Jorge Castañeda,
Utopia Unarmed: The Latin American Left after the Cold War (New York, 1991), 176–85; Mills, “On Latin America,
the Left, and the U.S.,” 115.
C. Wright Mills and Saul Landau photographed at Mills’s house in West Nyack, New
York, probably in the spring of 1961. Mills met Landau, a young editor of Studies on
the Left, in Cuba during the summer of 1960. Landau accompanied Mills to Europe in
1961 as his research assistant. Photo by Lillian Tonnaire Taylor. Courtesy Kate Mills.
nationalization by the Cuban government. In retaliation, the United States cancelled

Cuba’s guaranteed quota of sugar sales. Although Castro had previously received positive
U.S. press coverage, by 1960 he was generally portrayed as a dangerous Communist dic-
tator, even though he was not yet a Communist.43
Mills’s trip also occurred against the backdrop of the development in the United States
of a movement in solidarity with Cuba led by the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (fpcc),
founded in 1960. In its opposition to American foreign policy and solidarity with revolu-
tionary movements in underdeveloped nations, the fpcc was a crucial early organization
in 1960s-era radicalism. Seeking a “fair hearing” for the Cuban Revolution, the fpcc was
led by the former cbs journalist Robert Taber. It focused on countering negative and in-
accurate portrayals of the Cuban Revolution in the mass media and urged the American
government not to support counterrevolutionary activities. Beginning as a tiny ad hoc
group that published an advertisement in the New York Times, by the end of 1960, it had
seven thousand members in 27 adult chapters and 40 student councils. Presenting itself as
“a group of distinguished writers, artists, journalists, and professionals,” the fpcc seemed
to fulfill Mills’s calls for a radicalization of the cultural apparatus. Taber helped Mills ar-
range his trip to Cuba. When he arrived in Cuba, Mills met another prominent fpcc ac-
tivist, Saul Landau, a graduate student from the University of Wisconsin and an editor
and cofounder of Studies on the Left, who would subsequently become Mills’s research as-
sistant, traveling with him to Europe in 1961.44
43
C. Wright Mills to Hans Gerth, July 15, 1960, in C. Wright Mills, ed. Mills and Mills, 304. Jules R. Benja-
min, The United States and the Origins of the Cuban Revolution: The Empire of Liberty in an Age of National Liberation
(Princeton, 1990), 194–95.
44
The description of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee is quoted in Gosse, Where the Boys Are, 175. Saul Lan-
dau, “C. Wright Mills: The Last Six Months,” Ramparts, 4 (Aug. 1965), 45–54.
Mills spent barely more than two weeks in Cuba, but he made the most of his time.
With the assistance of a translator, he interviewed members of the revolutionary move-
ment at all levels. And he spent “three and a half eighteen-hour days” with Castro himself.
Because he did not speak Spanish, because his time was short, and because his activities
were largely arranged by Cuban government officials, there were very clear limits to what
Mills was able to learn during his trip. Though he sometimes worried that he might not
be properly prepared to comment on Cuba, Mills was swept up in the excitement of a
revolutionary situation and calculated that no other figure was willing and able to offer
a sympathetic perspective on the revolution for a mass American audience. As one of the
only prominent American leftists with no history of association with the Communist
party or Popular Front organizations, Mills believed he was ideally suited to articulate the
cause of the Cuban revolutionaries in the United States. One Cuban whom Mills talked
with during his trip asked Mills whether he’d be “considered a Communist” if he criti-
cized U.S. policy toward Cuba. “On the contrary,” Mills replied, “it is known that I’m
not. This is the most worrisome thing about me.”45
When Mills returned from Cuba, he wrote Listen, Yankee within weeks. It was pub-
lished in November 1960 as a mass-market paperback. Though it contained an intro-
duction and conclusion in Mills’s own voice, the body of Listen, Yankee was written as
a series of letters addressed to the American public by a fictional Cuban revolutionary.
This stylistic device underlined one of Mills’s central points, emphasized by the fpcc, that
the Cuban Revolution deserved a fair hearing from the American public that the biased
mainstream media did not provide. Contemporary readers are likely to be struck by the
audacity of Mills’s claim to represent a Cuban revolutionary, but at the time many Latin
American intellectuals were unconcerned by the technique. Mills himself worried about
feigning to speak in a Cuban voice, but his Cuban translator reassured him.46 For Mills,
adopting that voice was a way of expressing solidarity. Even when writing in his own
voice, Mills identified with the Cuban revolutionaries. “I do not worry about the Cuban
revolution,” he wrote, “I worry with it.” Nonetheless, one should certainly be skeptical of
Mills’s claim that “the facts and interpretations presented in these letters from Cuba accu-
rately reflect, I believe, the views of the Cuban revolutionary. . . . I have merely organized
them—in the most direct and immediate fashion of which I am capable.”47
Listen, Yankee offered a sharp challenge to American foreign policy. Mills detailed the
long history of American intervention in Cuba, pointing to U.S. government support of
the corrupt and brutal dictator, Fulgencio Batista, overthrown by the Twenty-sixth of July
movement led by Castro. Mills also indicated the larger context of U.S. imperialism in
Latin America, pointing to U.S. policies driven by the search for profit and power, and
not by the nation’s professed commitment to democratic ideals. As Mills correctly pre-
dicted, American economic sanctions against Cuba were likely to escalate into military
support for a counterrevolution. “Isn’t your Government really left with only one way to
act against our Government and against us,” Mills’s fictional Cuban argued, “military vio-
lence against Cuba?” Already in 1960, the U.S. government was gearing up for the Bay of
Pigs debacle in April 1961, when exiles backed by the Central Intelligence Agency (cia)
45
Mills, Listen, Yankee, 11; Cuban official interview by C. Wright Mills, Aug. 1960, audiotape (in Geary’s pos-
session).
46
“The Causes of C. Wright Mills,” Oct. 1, 1962, dir. Saul Landau and Elsa Knight Thompson, radio docu-
mentary, available from Pacifica Radio Archives: From the Vault, http://fromthevaultradio.org/.
47
Mills, Listen, Yankee, 179, 8.
launched a surprise invasion of the island that was easily repelled. American hostility to
Cuba, Mills accurately pointed out, was a major force pushing Castro’s government into
the Soviet orbit. Indeed, one of the most effective rhetorical strategies of Listen, Yankee
was the direct appeal of the fictional Cuban revolutionary to the American public to scru-
tinize and change the U.S. government’s policies:
Because Cuba—listen, Yankee—Cuba is your big chance. It’s your chance to estab-
lish once again what the United States perhaps once did mean to the world. It’s your
chance to make it clear how you’re going to respond to all the chaos and tumult
and glory, all the revolution and bloody mess and enormous hopes that are coming
about among all the impoverished, disease-ridden, illiterate, hungry peoples of the
world in which you, Yankee, are getting so fat and so drowsy.48
Like the influential historian and critic of American imperialism, William Appleman
Williams, Mills used the Cuban case to argue that the United States needed to reevalu-
ate its foreign policy to have an “open door for revolutions” in the Third World. From
the very first page, Mills made it clear that his concern was not just with Cuba, but with
the exploited peoples of the underdeveloped world and their struggles against their im-
perial or neoimperial masters. “Cuba’s voice today is a voice of the hungry-nation bloc,”
he proclaimed, “and the Cuban revolutionary is now speaking—most effectively—in the
name of that bloc.” “In Africa, in Asia, as well as in Latin America,” he continued, “the
people behind this voice are becoming strong in a kind of fury they’ve never known
before.”49
Listen, Yankee left little doubt that Mills believed the Cuban Revolution was in fact the
“third model” he had hoped for in world politics. “The Cuban revolutionary is a new and
distinct type of left-wing thinker and actor,” Mills declared. “He is neither capitalist nor
Communist. He is socialist in a manner, I believe, both practical and humane.” The Cu-
ban Revolution, Mills believed, had freed itself from the Communist baggage of the Old
Left. Though he noted that the Cuban government received aid from the Soviet Union,
Mills insisted on the non-Communist nature of the revolution. Through the voice of his
fictional Cuban, Mills hailed the Cuban Revolution as a new beginning for the interna-
tional Left: “We are revolutionaries of the post-Stalin era . . . we’ve never had any ‘God
That Failed’. . . . We are new radicals. We really are, we think, a new left in the world. A
left that has never suffered from all that Stalinism has meant to the old left all over the
world.”50
Describing the Cuban Revolution as a nondogmatic yet radical social transformation
that portended a left-wing revival centered in the Third World, Mills found himself in
agreement with many U.S. and European leftists. The editors of the independent Marx-
ist journal, Monthly Review, Leo Huberman and Paul M. Sweezy, traveled to Cuba a few
months before Mills; their book, Cuba: Anatomy of a Revolution, appeared shortly before
Listen, Yankee. Huberman and Sweezy enthused that “this is the first time—ever, any-
where—that a genuine socialist revolution has been made by non-Communists!” Studies on
the Left similarly viewed the Cuban Revolution as a “refreshing combination of human-
48
Ibid., 66, 152.
49
William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (New York, 1962). In this second edition of
his work, Williams introduced his narrative by noting how American relations with Cuba from 1898 to 1961 sym-
bolized the tragedy of American diplomacy. See also William Appleman Williams, The United States, Cuba, and Cas-
tro: An Essay on the Dynamics of Revolution and Dissolution of Empire (New York, 1962). Mills, Listen, Yankee, 1.
50
Mills, Listen, Yankee, 181, 43.
ism and rationalism.” Studies also published an article by the French intellectual Jean-Paul
Sartre, who traveled to Cuba shortly after the revolution and hailed it as a new beginning
for the international Left. Mills’s portrayal of Cuban revolutionaries as a radical “third
force” beyond Soviet Communism and American capitalism also rested on the Cuban
leaders’ self-portrayal at the time. For instance, Mills quoted Fidel Castro’s statement,
“Capitalism sacrifices man; the Communist state, by its totalitarian concept, sacrifices
the rights of man.”51
This interpretation of the Cuban Revolution as democratic and humanistic, which
Mills shared with other leftists, was oversimplified and in many ways naïve. For one thing,
Mills’s inclusion of Castro’s revolutionaries as part of a global New Left complicated his
analysis of a cultural apparatus as the most vital New Left agency. Mills helped bring
about an alliance between the revolutionary intelligentsia of Cuba and the cultural ap-
paratus in other nations, but his lumping of them together as a single international New
Left obscured crucial differences. Mills saw the Cuban Revolution as the work of a “young
intelligentsia in contact with the poorer people.”52 Indeed, the leaders of the Cuban Revo-
lution were educated and relatively young. Yet Mills failed to recognize that Cuban lead-
ers constituted a very different political agency than the cultural apparatus of the United
States and the United Kingdom, or even Poland or Mexico. Rather than aiming first to
change the nature of public discourse, Cuban leaders had seized state power through vio-
lent means and had a vested interest in remaining in power.
Accordingly, Mills overlooked the dangers of revolutionary dictatorship in Cuba.
Mills’s fictional letter writer praised Fidel Castro for his “anti-bureaucratic personality,”
calling him “the most directly radical and democratic force in Cuba.” “Above all,” he
wrote, “we believe neither Fidel Castro nor any other of our revolutionary leaders will
use force to maintain himself in power.” In his concluding note to the reader, Mills ad-
opted a soberer tone, admitting, “I do not like such dependence upon one man as exists
in Cuba today, nor the virtually absolute power that one man possesses.” In general, how-
ever, Mills deflected criticism of the Cuban government by referring any defects in it to
the unjustness of American foreign policy. Responding to the criticism of an old friend,
the historian Frank Freidel, Mills wrote, “Please know that I too see a lot of ‘unpleasant-
ness’ in the Cuban possibilities—but most of them, I think are being brought on by U.S.
action and inaction. And that’s the point for us, isn’t it?”53
At times Mills worried that he had rushed to judgment about Cuba. As he wrote to
E. P. Thompson late in 1960, “I’ve been running since last February, when I went first to
Mexico, then Russia, then Cuba. Too much fast writing, too many decisions of moral and
intellectual types, made too fast, on too little evidence.” Mills’s willingness to embrace the
Cuban Revolution uncritically might be understood as foreshadowing the identification
of later new leftists with nondemocratic Communist movements in the Third World. But
Castro was hardly Mao Zedong or Ho Chi Minh. In 1960 Mills’s analysis of the Cuban
revolution as popular, noncommunist, and radical was still plausible, if oversimplified.54
51
Leo Huberman and Paul M. Sweezy, Cuba: Anatomy of a Revolution (New York, 1960), 154. As quoted in
Gosse, Where the Boys Are, 163. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Ideology and Revolution,” Studies on the Left, 1 (no. 3, 1960),
7–16; Jean-Paul Sartre, Sartre on Cuba (New York, 1961); Mills, Listen, Yankee, 99.
52
Mills interview.
53
Mills, Listen, Yankee, 123, 125, 183; C. Wright Mills to Frank Freidel, Oct. 21, 1960, in C. Wright Mills, ed.
Mills and Mills, 319.
54
Mills is quoted in E. P. Thompson, The Heavy Dancers (London, 1985), 268. On the Cuban Revolution, see
Samuel Farber, The Origins of the Cuban Revolution Reconsidered (Chapel Hill, 2006); Marifeli Pérez-Stable, The Cu-
There is strong evidence that after Castro signaled his conversion to Communism in a
December 1961 speech in which he declared himself a Marxist-Leninist, Mills became
more critical, even privately feeling that Castro had betrayed him. Indeed, since he looked
to Cuba for a noncommunist democratic third model of New Left social change in the
underdeveloped world, it was only natural that Mills would have been disappointed with
Cuba’s turn toward Communism. Therefore, it would be a mistake to view Mills as a
progenitor of the Leninist Third World Marxists who came to prominence in the later
1960s.55
Listen, Yankee was significant because it capitalized on the concrete connections that
Mills had made with new leftists in various nations. As part of a wider reaction to the Cu-
ban Revolution that energized radicals everywhere, Listen, Yankee both represented and
influenced the emerging international New Left. Though Mills never proposed that the
Cuban Revolution could serve as a model for political change in the industrialized West,
he did hope that it could foster an internationalist New Left consciousness in the United
States and the world. “Whether they know it or not,” Mills wrote in a blurb for Sartre’s
On Cuba, “for the generation just coming to maturity, the revolution in Cuba is their
‘Spanish Civil War.’”56
Mills’s book, of course, was primarily addressed to its “Yankee” audience. Mills aimed
to “get the United States . . . out of its present status as the provincial zone of the Ameri-
cas.” Cuba was a test case for how Americans would respond to Third World liberation
movements, and Mills hoped the American people could be aroused to alter the poli-
cies of their government. Indeed, Listen, Yankee injected new questions about American
foreign policy toward Cuba into the public sphere and thereby helped refocus American
public opinion on the justness of American policies toward the underdeveloped world.
Released in October 1960, by January 1961 the book had sold a remarkable 370,000 cop-
ies. Many others were exposed to it through an excerpt that Mills published in Harper’s
Magazine. The book was reviewed in countless magazines and newspapers throughout the
nation. Like Mills’s earlier books, it was reviewed in major urban newspapers, but also
in countless smaller publications such as the Crawfordsville (IN) Journal and Review, the
Virginian-Pilot and the Plymouth Star, the Lafayette (LA) Observer, and the Bristol (CT)
Press. Though the book was denounced more often than it was praised, the response sug-
gested that there was indeed an opening in the cultural apparatus to the views of a radical.
No less a figure than Eleanor Roosevelt praised Mills’s “most controversial but interesting
book.” Because of the impact the book had, Mills was invited to appear on the nbc televi-
sion show, The Nation’s Future, to debate A. A. Berle, a spokesperson for John F. Kennedy.
Unfortunately, however, Mills suffered a heart attack on the eve of the program and had
to cancel the engagement.57
ban Revolution: Origins, Course, and Legacy (New York, 1994); Morris H. Morley, Imperial State and Revolution: The
United States and Cuba, 1952–1986 (New York, 1987); and Benjamin, United States and the Origins of the Cuban
Revolution.
55
See Yaroslava Mills to Fannye and C. G. Mills, Feb. 22, 1962, box 4B 353, Mills Papers. Because Mills died
in April 1962 and was ill before then, he never publicly commented on the turn toward Communism in Cuba. Fed-
eral Bureau of Investigation files on Mills also offer evidence that he was disillusioned with Fidel Castro at the end
of his life. See Mike Forrest Keen, Stalking the Sociological Imagination: J. Edgar Hoover’s fbi Surveillance of American
Sociology (Westport, 1999), 183. For a sympathetic account of Third World Marxism in the United States, see Max
Elbaum, Revolution Is in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao, and Che (New York, 2002).
56
C. Wright Mills to Richard, March 6, 1961, box 4B 394, Mills Papers.
57
C. Wright Mills to Mr. Obelensky, Oct. 26, 1960, Fuentes Papers. Mills suggested the quote as a blurb for
the English translation of the novel Carlos Fuentes, Where the Air Is Clear, trans. Sam Hileman (New York, 1960).
The impact of Listen, Yankee was hardly limited to the United States. British new left-
ists also followed events in Cuba closely. Urging critical support of the revolution, New
Left Review editors wrote in early 1961 that “Cuba’s example will be of the very greatest
importance to countries—in Latin America, Africa, Asia—where a similar combination
of circumstances could lead on to a similar understanding.” Noting that none of its Brit-
ish contributors had yet been to Cuba, the editors concluded that they “must rely on sec-
ond-hand accounts” from “some of our most-trusted fellow socialists” abroad, including
Huberman and Sweezy, Sartre, and, of course, Mills. Subsequently, the New Left Review
published an interview with Saul Landau, conducted when Landau was traveling in Eu-
rope with Mills. Indeed, Mills sought to create ties between the British New Left and the
Cuban Revolution. For instance, he tried (unsuccessfully) to convince Castro to invite
E. P. Thompson to be a visiting professor at the University of Oriente. Before his death
Mills had agreed to collaborate with the British new leftist Robin Blackburn on a project
about Cuba. Cuba also connected Mills to the French Left: during his 1961 trip to Eu-
rope, Mills discussed the revolution’s continuing development with Sartre and Simone de
Beauvoir at a Left Bank Paris restaurant.58
Listen, Yankee also had a significant impact in Latin America. Shortly after the book
was published in the United States, a Spanish translation appeared. The publisher was the
influential left-wing Mexican publishing house, Fondo de Cultura Económica, headed by
the Argentine radical Arnaldo Orfila Reynal. Fuentes played a key role in helping Mills
find the publisher, one that Mills hoped would distribute the book not only in “book-
stores” but also in “railroad stations.” When Mills’s book was criticized in the U.S. press,
left-wing Latin American intellectuals were quick to defend it. To such Latin American
intellectuals, just as to British new leftists earlier, Mills became a symbol of a reawakening
American radicalism. His example suggested that there were elements within American
society that supported, not hemispheric domination, but greater democracy and social
justice in the region. Fuentes, for instance, looked for allies among “those nuclei of dem-
ocratic opinion in the U.S. that are in a position to support our liberation movements.”
Hence, he dedicated his novel The Death of Artemio Cruz to Mills as a “true representa-
tive of the American people.” In Cuba itself Mills’s book was hailed for its accurate depic-
tion of the revolution. When Mills died in April 1962, the Cuban newspaper El Mundo
claimed that the United States had lost “a mentor and distinguished representative.” Fidel
Castro sent a wreath of flowers to the memorial service.59
C. Wright Mills, “‘Listen, Yankee’: The Cuban Case against the United States,” Harper’s Magazine, 122 (Dec. 1960),
31–37. For the reviews in small-city newspapers, see clippings file, box 4B 394, Mills Papers. Eleanor Roosevelt,
“New Look at Cuba,” New York Post Magazine, Dec. 14, 1960, p. 3; Mills and Mills, ed., C. Wright Mills, 321.
58
“The Siege of Cuba,” New Left Review (no. 7, Jan.–Feb. 1961), 2. See also Stuart Hall and Norm Fruchter,
“Notes on the Cuban Dilemma,” ibid. (no. 9, May–June 1961), 2–12. Saul Landau, “Cuba: The Present Dilemma,”
ibid., 12–22; C. Wright Mills to Fidel Castro, Sept. 20, 1960, in C. Wright Mills, ed. Mills and Mills, 315; Robin
Blackburn to Daniel Geary, June 28, 2007 (in Geary’s possession); Landau, “C. Wright Mills,” 49–50; Simone de
Beauvoir, Force of Circumstance (New York, 1964), 589–90.
59
C. Wright Mills, Escucha, yanqui: La revolución en Cuba (Listen, Yankee: The revolution in Cuba), trans. J.
Campos and E. Gonzáloez Pedrero (Mexico City, 1961); Robert G. Mead Jr., “A Literary Letter from Mexico,” New
York Times, May 21, 1961, p. 26; C. Wright Mills to Fuentes, n.d., Fuentes Papers. For Fuentes’s statement, see Van
Delden, Carlos Fuentes, Mexico, and Modernity, 41. Carlos Fuentes, The Death of Artemio Cruz, trans. Sam Hileman
(New York, 1964); “Cuba Mourns Professor Mills,” New York Times, March 24, 1962, p. 25; Ralph Miliband, “C.
Wright Mills,” New Left Review (no. 15, May–June 1962), 19.
Mills, Racial Equality, and the New Left

Like Mills, many African American intellectuals sympathized with the Cuban Revolu-
tion. In 1960 a fpcc delegation including John Henrik Clarke, Harold Cruse, LeRoi
Jones, Julian Mayfield, and Robert F. Williams traveled to Cuba. When Fidel Castro
came to the United States in September 1960 for a United Nations meeting and met
rampant criticism by American officials and media, he relocated to Harlem where cheer-
ing crowds welcomed him. At a hastily organized fpcc reception for Castro held in
Harlem, Mills mingled not only with African American luminaries such as Langston
Hughes, but also with white ones such as Allen Ginsberg and I. F. Stone.60 To African
American leftists, the connection between racial oppression within the United States and
imperial relations with Third World countries seemed obvious. Yet, despite his interna-
tional turn, Mills consistently overlooked race as a fundamental factor in global social
oppression and the central role played by people of color in the emerging social move-
ments of the New Left.
To be sure, Mills supported racial equality. His public references to the civil rights
movement were positive, as in his brief mention of the Greensboro, North Carolina, sit-
in movement in “Letter to the New Left.” But such points of recognition were few and far
between. In particular, Mills made little mention of the U.S. black freedom struggle in his
writing. Why did Mills not devote more effort to analyzing and supporting movements
for racial equality? One reason is that Mills’s closest connections on the left had been with
anti-Stalinist New York intellectuals, who had never taken race seriously. His failure to
engage with the cause of African Americans in the United States might be understood
as illustrating the problem of a cosmopolitan internationalism that does not connect the
global to the local. Mills lived in Rockland County, New York, where nearly one-fifth
of the population was black. It was the site of protests in the late 1950s and early 1960s
against racial discrimination in housing, employment, recreational facilities, and educa-
tion. There is no indication that Mills participated in these demonstrations.61
Mills’s racial myopia not only prevented him from fully understanding the most sig-
nificant source of radical protest within the United States. It also constituted the principal
limitation in his analysis of the global New Left. In particular, Mills ignored the central-
ity of race for the postcolonial or underdeveloped world; nowhere in Listen, Yankee did
he address the issue. Though he hailed the Cuban Revolution as an example for Asia and
Africa, there is no evidence that he ever recognized the centrality of African independence
movements for the international Left. In a 1960 passage intended for future publication,
Mills admitted, “I have never been interested in what is now called ‘the Negro problem.’
Perhaps I should have been and should be now.” Indeed, it seems unlikely that Mills
would have retained his influence as an American herald of the international New Left
much longer had he not come to see the color line as a fundamental issue for leftists.62
In recent years, scholars have uncovered a rich tradition of post–World War II left-wing
antiracism and anti-imperialism evident in the symbolic and actual connections many Af-
rican American intellectuals and activists made with anticolonial liberation movements.63
60
Gosse, Where the Boys Are, 147, 149–52.
61
One of Rockland County’s other intellectual residents, Betty Friedan, did participate in the demonstrations.
See Daniel Horowitz, Betty Friedan and the Making of The Feminine Mystique: The American Left, the Cold War, and
Modern Feminism (Amherst, 1998), 168–69.
62
C. Wright Mills, “On Race and Religion” (Summer 1960), in C. Wright Mills, ed. Mills and Mills, 314.
63
Young, Soul Power; Nikhil Pal Singh, Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy
One might be tempted to view Mills merely as a representative of a separate white left in-
ternationalism that developed alongside such African American movements. That would
be a mistake. Despite Mills’s insensitivity to questions of race, there is historical evidence
that the New Left was not wholly segmented along racial lines. Race was a central issue
for most white American new leftists, and many of them criticized Mills for his lack of
attention to it.64 The emerging civil rights movement was a vital source of inspiration for
the American peace movement. Race was also important for the British New Left, as was
particularly evident in the work of Stuart Hall, a Jamaican immigrant.
African American leftists were influenced not only by anti-imperialist movements in
the Third World but also by the stirrings of the New Left in Europe that had so captured
Mills’s attention. Nonviolent direct action, the most significant tactic of the early New
Left, was central to the international peace movement as well as to the movement for Af-
rican American civil rights. For example, the American pacifist and civil rights activist Ba-
yard Rustin had close connections to the British pacifist Left associated with Peace News.
Rustin addressed the Aldermaston antinuclear march in England in 1958; he applied in-
sight and inspiration gleaned from it in his work as principal organizer of the 1963 March
on Washington. Another African American leftist, Bill Sutherland, worked closely with
British pacifists to organize protests against French nuclear tests in the Sahara in 1959,
drawing on his previous experience as an official in the government of Kwame Nkrumah
in newly independent Ghana. Thus the internationalism of black leftists such as Rustin
and Sutherland, while distinct, was intertwined with the internationalism of white left-
ists such as Mills.65
Moreover, despite his failure to place race and the black freedom struggle at the cen-
ter of his analysis, Mills’s influence on American protest movements of the 1960s-era
was not limited to white new leftists. One of the greatest admirers of Mills’s work, par-
ticularly his “Letter to the New Left,” was the African American intellectual and leading
theorist of black power, Harold Cruse. In The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (1967), Cruse
argued that, even though Mills was “an Anglo-Saxon and a Southerner at that,” he was
a significant New Left theorist who introduced “a new method for a new radical criti-
cism of American society.” Cruse praised Mills’s analysis of the “structural question of the
American cultural apparatus” and applied it by arguing that African American intellectu-
als needed to develop their own autonomous ideas and institutions. Cruse’s appropriation
of Mills indicates that even though Mills’s analysis suffered for its blind spot to race, the
conception of the New Left voiced by him—a diverse range of social movements con-
tained in the cultural apparatus and addressing social justice in global as well as national
terms—had broad appeal.66
By focusing narrowly on the white campus-based American New Left as a distinct
group, we miss the global interactions that played such a key role in the life of Mills and
other American leftists. We must understand the complex network of social protest move-
ments that emerged in the United States at the end of the 1950s as part of a world phe-
nomenon. Mills was much more than simply a forerunner to, or influence on, American
(Cambridge, Mass. 2004); Penny M. Von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–
1957 (Ithaca, 1997).
64
See, for instance, a published version of a 1964 master’s thesis completed at the University of Michigan: Tom
Hayden, Radical Nomad: C. Wright Mills and His Times (Boulder, 2006).
65
Bayard Rustin, “To the Finland Station,” Liberation, 6 (1958), 10–11; Wittner, Struggle against the Bomb, II,
49; Richard Taylor, Against the Bomb: The British Peace Movement, 1958–1965 (Oxford, 1988), 157–58.
66
Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York, 1967), 459, 467.
students such as those who founded sds. The example of C. Wright Mills illustrates the
need to interpret sixties-era social movements in a global context by applying the recent
scholarly insights into the international connections of African American intellectuals
and activists to white actors as well. Despite his failure to grapple with race, C. Wright
Mills’s conception of the New Left was broader than the one held by most scholars today,
reflecting his concrete engagements with radical people, ideas, and movements outside
the boundaries of the United States. His story thus suggests that scholars should not com-
partmentalize the disparate left-wing social movements of the long 1960s but capture the
significance of a movement spanning races, generations, and oceans.

Becoming International Again

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Becoming International Again

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

“Becoming International Again”:

C. Wright Mills and the Emergence

The “Pivotal Year”

The Cultural Apparatus

A Program for Peace

the Fellowship of Reconciliation (for), an international interfaith pacifist organization.

Cuba and “the Hungry-Nation Bloc”

nationalization by the Cuban government. In retaliation, the United States cancelled

Mills, Racial Equality, and the New Left

You might also like